The plain truth is that security is planned, not blindly bought. It is the
product of thought, and work, and our ability and readiness to bear our
military burden for however long the threat to freedom persists.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a strategic communicator, one who intentionally
shaped thought and language to achieve specific ends. Neither stylistically eloquent nor particularly distinguished in delivery, Eisenhower nevertheless fashioned some of the most important and strategically effective speeches of the
Cold War era. His First Inaugural Address, "The Chance for Peace,""Age of
Peril," and "Atoms for Peace" speeches, all delivered during his first year as
President, were masterpieces of rhetoric, discourse designed to achieve one or
more specific ends with one or more audiences.

How did a man who had spent all but three years of his adult life in the
military arrive at the presidency, at age sixty-three, with the ability to construct
rhetoric that was not only clear and convincing, but strategically effective in
implementing political, diplomatic, and economic policies? Such ability did not
just happen, and it was not a gift of nature. Neither was it an accident nor the
result of having employed a host of ghost writers. Although some of Eisenhower's effectiveness as a presidential communicator clearly came from his previously established ethos, the perception of his moral character held by the
American electorate, even that resource cannot fully account for Eisenhower's
success as a rhetorical strategist.

To understand Eisenhower's skills as a presidential communicator, one must
search for the source of those skills in Ike's earlier life, primarily his military
years, for in those years lay the key to the President's essentially strategic nature.
His presidential speeches were an outworking of this nature. While Eisenhower

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